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Wednesday, April 19, 1978
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kanan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
The city of Lawrence and its firemen apparently haven't learned their lesson.
Last summer, associations representing city police and firemen demanded 10 percent salary increases for 1978. Although the demands were perhaps inflated and were accompanied by loaded language from the employees, the city displayed a marked intransigence in refusing to negotiate the issues. Lasting bitterness may have resulted.
The ill feelings on the part of both labor and management surfaced last week when firemen sat down at the bargaining table to discuss their next contract. The negotiations lasted just 30 minutes; firemen refused to talk further unless the city considered a particular grievance claim related to "call back" pay, also known as overtime.
The firemen want a minimum of two hours' worth of call-back pay if they are asked to work only a few minutes beyond their original shift. The city wants to pay only for the few minutes. Buford Watson, city
manager, called the overtime demand "unwarranted." He's correct. What employer in the private sector would possibly put up with a similar demand?
THE CITY, in turn, does not seem responsive to the firemen's concern about having better communications equipment and a fourth city fire station, needed in southwest Lawrence. The city's position on the fire station is particularly puzzling. Parts of the city are at least four miles away from the nearest station, more if firemen's estimates are used. Yet the city contends that a fourth station isn't needed.
Firemen must constantly confront danger in performing their duties. The least they are entitled to receive is the chance to get to a fire quickly.
Bargaining is still in the preliminary stages, and there is still sufficient time for both sides to grow up. The firemen must stop making fervid salary requests; the city must start taking their working conditions more seriously. Public safety is at stake.
Fire policy unwise,unjust; false alarms mishandled
To the editor:
Last Wednesday morning, on another act in the life of a baby, Fire Alarm Force. Residents were (mostly) sleeping soundly in the predawn darkness when some children idiot pitched a fire alarm.
But that's not really what I want to write about. It's fairly common, and I think we can all agree it's a dumb thing to do.
I am writing to protest a residence hall policy. I believe it is one that is system-wide, I consider unwise and unjust.
The staff, following a new—or newly enforced—policy, forced everyone to evacuate and would not shut off the screaming sirens or let anybody back in until they had gotten every out of bed and out in the cold. If you didn't leave, a staff pounded on your door and called for help. If that didn't work, they opened your door with a master key and chucked you out in that fashion. The whole process took from 45 minutes to an hour.
A chosen few probably avoided it by hiding under their beds or by some other tactic. After finding out from a resident assistant that the alarm was a lake, I chained and barricaded my door and put on gloves. When there were about 500 people shivering in the early morning chill.
The administrators responsible for the residence halls are apparently using a tactic well-known to grade school teachers, principals and prison guards. They are asking you the rule, in this case, who pulled the alarm, you punish the entire group. The theory is that the harder you make it on the harder you will it will be at the perpetrator.
Administrators can thus get the group to enforce rules with which it disagrees.
In the past—and I was a resident assistant last year—the staff simply turned off the alarm as soon as we had searched the hall and either had pulled the door, or pulled, so we could shut it off, or had determined whether there was a fire.
If it was a false alarm, we let everyone go right back to bed. It's the only sensible thing to do. Residents knew that if the alarm was shut off after five or seven minutes, the alarm continued, it was real. Under the new policy, this tells you nothing.
But we could sediment catch the unhung fools who pulled the alarms, and this distressed the administrators to no end. The authorities were using new ways to cut down on the number of false alarms, among them the current policy. But most of us agreed that it would be unfair to make everyone suffer for false alarms. And the upper-level administrators aren't so conscientious. They don't have to live here.
KANSAN-
Letters
Some may reply that the rule or law is already on the books and that the administration has to enforce it; the old "I don't carry a gun" argument here, but this argument. That doesn't carry much weight here. There are numberless rules and laws on the books that aren't enforced—for example, the laws against assault and the state law against cohabitation.
Nor can the administrators assert that it's a result of political pressure in the wake of the fire deaths in Ottawa. The public furor over last year's revelation that pot is smoked in KU residence hall hasn't left it cracked inside least not in its residence hall. The smoke is thick in the hallway right now.
When administrators selectively enforce the rules, they certainly cannot dodge responsibility for them.
I certainly agree with the goal of trying to cut down on false alarms, but turning everyone out in the cold night for long periods just because you can't find someone's responsible is not the answer.
Perhaps alarms that squirt your hands with a harmless dye could be installed. It takes a couple of days to get the dye off, and people who pulled false alarms could be identified.
But, of course, we couldn't expect University bureaucrats to think of a solution that simple or practical.
bar." She quotes me as having said that "10 percent of the population is supposed to be gay." I do suppose that it is likely that 10 percent of the male population is primarily homosexual since these are the ones who attend Kinsley and others. And I did say this figure is probably higher in a college community, but neither Conkey nor anyone else should assume that I meant that any 10 percent of an population is "supposed" to be gay, in equal 10 percent of the female population is [lesbian].
I, for one, refuse to obey this asinine rule that I never agreed to and had no band in making.
Ross McIlvain Madison senior
Although it is true that I said it would be hard to find a good location for such a bar, one of the unidentified persons being questioned might be the reason, "because it shouldn't be too close to straight bars." If Katherine will remember, my primary concern was with the accessibility of such a bar to gays. Its being too narrow for many straight bars is only one of many reasons for my concern.
Gay percentage called misquote
Jean Ireland Co-coordinator, Gay Services of Kansas
I believe that Kathleen Conkey misquoted me in her article "Benefit concerts may finance Lawrence's first gay
To the editor:
Letters Policy
The Kansaan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten and addressed in the address and telephone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include the home town or faculty or staff position. Letters are not to exceed 500 words in length. Letters reserves the right to edit all letters for publication.
An attendant at a Lawrence travel service explains to a customer the advantages of booking a flight early.
What a language we develop..
"Here are the lower fares you can get by making your reservation seven days in your departure," he says.
A brochure for Wichita State University's program in investigative reporting states, and in an actual job situation.
Why do we write that way?
Why didn't the travel attendant say, "Here are the lower fares you can get by making your reservation seven days before you go?"
WHY DOESN'T the committee want a dean whose main responsibility is to improve graduate programs? Why can't Wichita State get its interns just plain jobs?
Not only does the University of Kansas have a Committee to Review the Structure and Organization of Research and Education, but an committee has unanimously recommended "the appointment of a dean of the graduate school whose major responsibility is the enhancement of quality in gradual programs.
The answer, my friend, currently is being agitated by currents from atmospheric disturbances. And one doesn't need a weatherman to know that the wind is blowing in a manner directed as writing gets more and more cluttered.
Ideally, everyone should write clearly, with words that are precise and with the intent of being understood. But idioms and inflected language is impressive language. They will go to any length to sound important, using "admixture" or "enclosed please" when "enclosed is" means the same
thing and calling any letter,
memo, newspaper clipping or
receipt a document.
These are the people who describe a marquee as "rooflike structure of a perimeter, where it is peared in recommendations on sign ordinances considered by the Lawrence City Commission. It seems people who work here do so in recommendations.
As children go through school, they are exposed to more and more complex language. Most of it is natural progression from "see Jane run" to everyday talk. Then students begin reading important works of philosophy, sociology and the like and understand the language that often is required to explain difficult concepts.
LIKE a distraught mother, the observer asks, "Where do they pick up this language?" But the concern for the language might be better founded than that for the sources of its demise. Gutter language may be gross, but it
communicates. Bureaucratic lingo only confuses.
Somewhere along the line, someone must have gotten the idea that the technical language sounded important. He began to adapt it to his own needs and make himself seem important.
The trouble with the idea was that it worked.
The writer convinced other writers that padding the language was a good idea. The word "vicious" on the vicious circle, or perhaps
WHAT IS unfortunate about students' learning to write and speak obtusely is that they do not learn how to write and speak correctly. The little rule of English apply, the rules themselves, are not coming across.
Back in ancient times, when cigarette companies could advertise on radio and television, one company said its cigarette "tastes good like the word should." Because the word should "like," compares two things, and "a cigarette should" is not a thing, the word should have been "as." People pointed that out to the company. Its names are "sugar," "sweet," slogan and asked, "What do you want? Good grammar or good taste?"
People got neither. Bad grammar is not good taste.
the cycle of self-perpetuating continuity, began.
Good language usage is not something for the experts. I'm not an expert myself — I used to be a very bad swimmer to "mute" to me. But when I found out that they were inflated language, and that didn't really mean anything, and that I could self use them, I asked why.
THE PUBLIC response might well be, "But that's a minor point." Certainly it's a minor point. But it's one of a growing number of minor points that are adding up to a major problem. As victims of state construction have leaked one crumbling brick in a building the mini-problem—unless it is followed by another and another.
That is what I'm doing now—ask why. It is baffling why an announcement from the KU business school advertises a job opening like this:
And it is strange that the same people who think it unimportant to get the little things right are the ones who will inflate their expressions in their next term paper or journal article or recommendation.
But the trend toward bad grammar is increasing faster than the number of cigarette smokers, and it may be hazardous to the language's health. The phrase "like I so often is used in referring to an actual statement. It's just as wrong," as "like a cigarette should" and for the same reason.
It's too bad. I was hoping there would be an opening for someone to send information to prospective students.
... and educators must share the blame
"The administrative assistant's primary responsibility will be to respond to initial inquiries and to provide programs in business."
By RONALD BERMAN N.Y. Times Features
WASHINGTON - The ability to write with sense and style has decreased and ought to be improved. There are an infinite number of cultural resources for educational illiteracy, but educational policy decisions are more responsible than the effects of television or whatever social abstraction can be invoked. It ought to be written clearly and with writing ability coincides with the kind and amount of teaching that governs it.
In the last decade the following have occurred: Composition courses have been dropped at universities and never undertaken in high schools; professors are anxious to assert their professionalism, have refused to teach writing. Few institutions have kept a required curriculum. Professors of English or
literature have been replaced by technicians whose work is not connected directly to classroom performance: the remedial class is a kind of Sunday school on campus.
Writing cannot be taught
THE VARIOUS policies that curtail writing do not choose to be aware that it is the fundamental mode of learning. I don't mean by this that learners should indicate intelligence or that "style" in writing implies some grace of character.
THE FACTS, I think, are that students like and respect hard work; that minorities are especially eager to do well and resent educational ploys; and most important of all, that the teacher is the single most important aspect of higher education.
For a number of reasons, none of them good, the amount of writing demanded in the course of their sharply. The theory behind this is that students can't do it (that is, they are minorities, disadvantaged, culturally indifferent, for example) (they remember the 1960s); and shouldn't have to do it (that is, faculty are somewhat nervous about course enrollment). It's not much of a theory.
from a textbook or by lecture.
to do it well—to do it at all—the teacher must confront a small group of students several times a week. They cannot indulge in a big-think because writing demands the attention of a lot of life's prizes of work. To make that work intelligible, the teacher must go over it in painful detail alone in his study and then again in the inquisitive presence of each individual student. At this level, writing is neither a "skill," nor is simply mindless jargon, nor a form of self-expression. It is difficult to read without being given to impulse and by which consciousness becomes thought.
Writing is a series of conceptual decisions. Within even fiction, it must describe, include, select, compare, define concepts, and make other logical responsibilities. It moves from evidence, through reasoning, to conclusion. It can do these things in a short amount of time indirect as poetry, as heavy as the law. But it does, after all, have to translate feeling and intuition into statement, and that procedure underlies every decision in the life of the mind.
There is, of course, a second and less methodological reason for writing: One never knows what he knows until it is written. This is to say, until the individual engages him extensively in the primary of intellectual battles, until he argues with his creativity, he cannot formulate that creativity.
FAR FROM "expressing" the self, what writing does is
allow judgment of the self.
That is why it is a critical procedure and why it is so important as a form of free play, to say nothing of imposed educational work.
It is refreshing now and then to find a social problem that has some definition. Literacy can be sharply improved by a combination of study, teaching and teamwork. Composition courses are better than remedial courses; tenured faculty are better teachers than the assistants who replace them in the trenches; and writing is at the same time the most useful of education means. The more the better.
Ronald Berman, a Shakespearean specialist and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
I've always been slightly opposed to the feminist movement on the grounds that I am a prettie girl. For this reason, I admit to being modestly sexist. However, the Kansan's coverage on Sunflower made me want to burn my jock.
To the editor:
Certainly, the Sunflower
KANSAN Letters
Hostesses program must be an above-board operation. I have no doubt that the hostesses are of the highest morals, and certainly there is little objectionable behavior from the organization that promotes a favorite activity. But the selective hiring of participants in this program has to constitute one of the most repugnant cases of sex abuse in BC first thought about Angels.
There is no reason why a male can't chaperone a high schooler around Lawrence every bit as well as a female. Lawrence KUAC dropped the requirement to find dates for the fun-seekers. I think I could keep an interesting conversation going with a "huge guy from out on the field" who blamed Janet Gernan learned how. The criterion of discrimination here appears to be potential ability to seduce. All males must object to this being never offered a modeling or female job must also object.
By allowing such a program to exist, the University is promoting flirtation as a means
of self-perpetuation. I find this objectionable.
I still have a hard time understanding where the athletic department gets the money to operate programs like Sunflower Hostesses. Surely there are expenses incurred in the preparation of theseenses? Me! Am I paying for some other guy to get smiled at by a pretty face? How come I'm not being escorted to supper?
James Hoppie Glencoe, Minn., graduate student
Lastly, I hope all readers closely followed the prose and wisdom of Jerry Waugh, assistant athletic director. This guy had to come on a straight court blindfolded on a donkey. Says Waugh: We want somebody who is a good scout—loyal, trustworthy, brave, and not easy. I'm not at all sure that Waugh and Mr. B.-e-e, also featured in the Kansan, are not one and the same. Hec-heh-heh. I turned this over to his boss yet, who of course would have run the program correctly—by getting the Dallas Cowgirls to do the dirty work. I hope I got my mind set on being an athlete sex scandal audience UI sheepskin.
To the editor:
Procure funds to get signs
Barb Koenig correctly conveys the idea that the new law school was deficient with respect to raised-letter identifying room signs for the blind. A few errors should be corrected by the department, and assert that tactile warning devices, such as knurled door knobs, were lacking in that facility. The law school should have raised letter graphics for the blind because they have been required by law since 1970. The noncomprehensive law school was planned and constructed before "Section 504" was
adopted, as Lucas is reported as saying. On May 10, 1973, the dean of the law school, in response to his request for such graphics, said that required raised letter graphics and was further informed that it was a minimum standard. There should be funds remaining to correct over-prints in in other new construction.
"Section 504" is relevant to this issue only in that it forbids discrimination on the basis of handicap, and the erection of facilities in violation of existing laws. It also restricts interests of persons with disabilities may be viewed by some as being discriminatory.
Roger Williams, chairperson Committee for the
architecturally handicapped
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